The emergence of systems of lexical and grammatical tone and stress in Caribbean and West African Creoles

Abstract

The complex contact situation that developed among speakers of Niger-Congo and Indo-European languages in the Caribbean during the era of colonial plantation slav-ery gave rise to creoles with similarly complex pitch-related suprasegmental systems. In Afro-Caribbean creoles, the reinterpretation of stress in European superstrate languages in terms of the tone and stress systems that typify West African substrate languages often leads to greater complexity than that found in either the superstrate or the substrate languages. Despite this complexity, the general characteristics of tone and stress in Afro-Caribbean creoles resemble much more those found along the west coast of Africa than those found in other regions where tone systems are commonly encountered, such as East Asia and Mesoamerica. This suggests that in any scenario for the emergence of creole languages, consideration should be given to linguistic and cultural continuity from the substrates.